written 28 July 2022

I've doing a bunch of stuff today to try to be productive and not feel lethargic. I'm not really sure how well it's going for me. I only have two main things I really need to get done right now, my AP Physics online course and my college essays. Even if I do a bunch of cool stuff, I won't feel productive if I don't make a dent on my two big obligations. I finished a lab and read through some of the notes for AP Physics so I guess that's nice. I'm writing this to take a break from getting mad at nvm (more on that later) and I'll try to work on my essays right after.

Jeez, I'm dehydrated.

So I live in a house built in the middle of a hill, long, steep hill. Nothing like a forty-five degree angle hiking trail or anything, but something that just makes it hard for a new inline skate user like me to get home.

Alright I've just realized that this ramble is going to be all over the place. I apologize in advance.

So backing up a bit. I've started learning inline skating! My neighboorhood is amazing for learning with its endless miles of smooth road and sidewalk. I've learned how to push off and accelerate, spin spot, t stop, and yesterday, I took my soul slide out for practice for the first time. That's a braking technique that puts a foot in front of you to slow you down. And I finally managed to get to my house from the top of the hill in roller blades! I've been needing to put on shoes and walk down, so that felt really accomplishing. When I was in Cambridge the last two weeks, I saw lots of people commuting with roller blades so that kind of inspired me to get better. I'm also trying to learn the pistol squat because it's applicable to roller blading. Also because I saw a girl doing it at Dunster (so many inside jokes about Dunster) and it looked badass. She said she did ice skating.

Btw, good public transport is cool! Also, Rollerblade is a brand name, and apparently calling inline skates roller blades is a generification, like how people say Jell-O to mean the generic "gelatin desert" when it's actually a brand name, and how Ziplock bags can refer to any plastic bags with those zipper things on them. English is cool. My AP Lang teacher was cool.

He got us talking at the start of every class about literally anything. "New, Exciting, and Different," he called it. He believed that it wasn't really feasible to "practice" for the AP Lang test because they just test you on the most random things, so instead of teaching more traditionally, he set off time to talk about random things among ourselves like world news, an old farmer who committed suicide because his farm was getting seized (through eminent domain), the ways different types of foods are processed to last longer, and how it reflects our human history (yogurt, salted meats, bread, etc were invented before refridgeration because they have preserving properties, but we still eat them because we think they taste good, even though their original use cases aren't an issue).

I wanted to talk about what I did today, but I got really off track. I'll just list a few things, and I think I'll be done word vomiting for today. I finally cleaned my bedroom sliding mirror, cut up an undersized gray Walmart shirt to do that. (Cheap clothes? Outfits and gear in general? There's another topic I could go on a while about) Wow, I did not do much else that I haven't already talked about. (Ok going off topic again, but I cut up a trifold wallet to make a bifold and a really thin single thing wallet, and when I went to Harvard for the summer camp, pretty much everyone I saw also had these really thin wallets. My dad has a really thick one because he has so many cards. I should talk about my obsession with keybinds later.)

Current song stuck in head: None, but I found Di Young - Pixel Pig, and that just evokes memories of years ago in middle school. Something about the style of free electronic songs for YouTube compilations in the 2010s has just been infused into this song, istg.